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Ida Vines Moffett (1905-1996)
Born on April 9, 1905 in Toadvine, Alabama, Ida Vines Moffett was one of
the most beloved and influential Alabamians in the health profession. As a
nurse for more than 70 years, she was a gifted healer whose touch could
transform a patient’s health. She spent most of that time at the executive
level of the Baptist Hospital system based in Birmingham. She blended roles as
clinical nurse administrator with her leadership in nurse education. But she
never gave up her passions: comforting desperately sick people and raising the
standard of their care.
 In 1923, she graduated from Alliance High
School; and, encouraged by public health nurses in her rural community of
Jefferson County, she enrolled in the Birmingham Baptist Hospital School of
Nursing. As part of her training, Ida immediately began work as a bedside
nurse. After completing the required 1,095 days of hands-on-training, Ida
passed the state examination and became Registered Nurse number 1830 in Alabama
on June 3, 1926.
After graduation, she worked in a physician’s office and
served a private duty nurse at Baptist Hospital. Local physicians arranged for
her to go away for a year’s post graduate study. She trained in orthopedic
nursing at the University of Iowa hospital and then studied surgical nursing at
the University of Cincinnati. Back in Birmingham in June 1928, she became
operating room supervisor for Birmingham Baptist Hospital, serving until her
marriage to Howard D. Moffett on June 29,1929. She returned to Birmingham in
1934 as head nurse of the second branch of Baptist Hospital, the Highland
Avenue Baptist Hospital.
Ida dedicated her life to providing quality care and creating
standardized nursing education. A pioneer in setting standards for healthcare,
she became the first woman involved in achieving school accreditation, in
forming university- level degree programs for nursing, in closing substandard
nursing schools, in organizing hospital peer groups, in licensing practical
nursing, and in starting junior college-level degree programs for nurses. Half
way through her career, the Baptist Hospital nursing school was named The Ida
V. Moffett School of Nursing in recognition of her contributions to
Alabama’s healthcare profession.
Having presided over the graduation and licensing of more than
4,000 nurses, and having led the major health care professional organizations
of the state, she made an indelible mark on an industry. Her grip on the hearts
and minds of people in the health care industry of Alabama lay not so much in
what she did, but in who she was, and how she lived. Her character, wit, common
sense, and passionate love for sick people captured the hearts of patients and
professionals. So persuasive and pervasive was she, that nurses everywhere
continue to promote her ideals. She died at Montclair Baptist Hospital November
17, 1996 from heart failure.
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Past Inductees
